Posts Tagged 'Quantastor'

This guest blog was contributed by William Rocca of OS NEXUS. OS NEXUS makes the Quantastor Software Defined Storage platform designed to tackle the storage challenges facing cloud computing, Big Data and high performance applications.

Over the last decade, the creation and popularization of SAN/NAS systems simplified the management of storage into a single appliance so businesses could efficiently share, secure and manage data centrally. Fast forward about 10 years in storage innovation, and we're now rapidly changing from a world of proprietary hardware sold by big-iron vendors to open-source, scale-out storage technologies from software-only vendors that make use of commodity off-the-shelf hardware. Some of the new technologies are derivatives of traditional SAN/NAS with better scalability while others are completely new. Object storage technologies such as OpenStack SWIFT have created a foundation for whole new types of applications, and big data technologies like MongoDB, Riak and Hadoop go even further to blur the lines between storage and compute. These innovations provide a means for developing next-generation applications that can collect and analyze mountains of data. This is the exciting frontier of open storage today.

This frontier looks a lot like the "Wild West." With ad-hoc solutions that have great utility but are complex to setup and maintain, many users are effectively solving one-off problems, but these solutions are often narrowly defined and specifically designed for a particular application. The question everyone starts asking is, "Can't we just evolve to having one protocol ... one technology that unites them all?"

If each of these data storing technologies have unique advantages for specific use cases or applications, the answer isn't to eliminate protocols. To borrow a well-known concept from Physics, the solution lies in a "Unified Field Theory of Storage" — weaving them together into a cohesive software platform that makes them simple to deploy, maintain and operate.

When you look at the latest generation of storage technologies, you'll notice a common thread: They're all highly-available, scale-out, open-source and serve as a platform for next-generation applications. While SAN/NAS storage is still the bread-and-butter enterprise storage platform today (and will be for some time to come) these older protocols often don't measure up to the needs of applications being developed today. They run into problems storing, processing and gleaning value out of the mountains of data we're all producing.

Thinking about these challenges, how do we make these next-generation open storage technologies easy to manage and turn-key to deploy? What kind of platform could bring them all together? In short, "What does the 'Unified Field Theory of Storage' look like?"

These are the questions we've been trying to answer for the last few years at OS NEXUS, and the result of our efforts is the QuantaStor Software Defined Storage platform. In its first versions, we focused on building a flexible foundation supporting the traditional SAN/NAS protocols but with the launch of QuantaStor v3 this year, we introduced the first scale-out version of QuantaStor and integrated the first next-gen open storage technology, Gluster, into the platform. In June, we launched support of ZFS on Linux (ZoL), and enhanced the platform with a number of advanced enterprise features, such as snapshots, compression, deduplication and end-to-end checksums.

This is just the start, though. In our quest to solve the "Unified Field Theory of Storage," we're turning our eyes to integrating platforms like OpenStack SWIFT and Hadoop in QuantaStor v4 later this year, and as these high-power technologies are streamlined under a single platform, end users will have the ability to select the type(s) of storage that best fit a given application without having to learn (or unlearn) specific technologies.

The "Unified Field Theory of Storage" is emerging, and we hope to make it downloadable. Visit OSNEXUS.com to keep an eye on our progress. If you want to incorporate QuantaStor into your environment, check out SoftLayer's preconfigured QuantaStor Mass Storage Server solution.